Danny Palmer / via ZDNet / Oct. 31, 2019

Gafgyt has been updated with new capabilities, and it spreads by killing rival malware.

Tens of thousands of Wi-Fi routers are potentially vulnerable to an updated form of malware which takes advantage of known vulnerabilities to rope these devices into a botnet for the purposes of selling distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack capabilities to cyber criminals.

A new variant of Gafgyt malware – which first emerged in 2014 – targets small office and home routers from well known brands, gaining access to the devices via known vulnerabilities.

via Web Foundation / Oct. 29, 2019

On October 29, 1969, the internet era began as UCLA Computer Science Professor Len Kleinrock sent the first message on ARPANET, a network of computers that would evolve to become the internet.

Five decades later, and 30 years since the World Wide Web brought the internet into the mainstream, global digital connectivity has fundamentally changed our world.

Marc Canel / via TechRadar / Oct. 29, 2019

The emergence of AI in consumer security

For the last few years, internet security has been based on a combination of anti-virus software, isolation techniques and encryption software. Government bodies and security companies would track traffic on the internet and look for suspicious materials based upon their signature.

These techniques focused on running anti-malware software after the facts. They enabled the segregation between good data and malware. But if malware was undetected, it could lurk in the background of systems for months or even years and become active later in time.

Lily Hay Newman / via WIRED / Oct. 29, 2019

Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant now all give you ways to opt out of human transcription of your voice snippets. Do it.

After months of revelations and apologies, all the major smart assistant makers have revamped how they handle human review of audio snippets. Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Microsoft Cortana were all using third-party contractors to transcribe and vet recorded snippets, adding some human brain power to underlying machine learning algorithms. But the backlash over the lack of transparency spurred new customer controls. And with the release of Apple's iOS 13.2 on Monday, you now have one more way to rein that data collection in.

Jon Porter / via THE VERGE / Oct. 28, 2019

The company is reportedly hiring engineers to turn HomeKit around

Apple is focusing on its HomeKit initiative with a series of new hires, despite the fact that it’s falling behind Amazon and Google in the smart home space. Bloomberg reports that the company has posted 15 job listings for engineers to work on HomeKit since last month, and it has also been privately seeking out potential new hires in the internet-connected devices industry. The publicly available listings note that prospective employees should have supply chain expertise as well as experience building battery-powered wireless devices that include camera modules.

IANS / via ummid.com / Oct. 26, 2019

Smart home hubs, which connect either locally or to the cloud, are useful for IoT devices

New York: Smart bulbs are expected to be a popular purchase this holiday season. But could lighting your home open up your personal information to hackers? Now a new study from an Indian-origin researcher shows that the hackers' next prime target could be smart bulbs.

Some smart bulbs connect to a home network without needing a smart home hub, centralised hardware or software device where another internet of things (IoT) products communicate with each other.

Guest Writer / via IoT For All / Oct. 25, 2019

Businesses must know how to extract value from IoT device data. This means learning about different IoT data sources and their impact on storage and how automation can derive more value from IoT data.

Gartner predicted in 2017 that there will be 20 billion connected things online by 2020. Since that prediction, the adoption of IoT technology has met and surpassed the predictor’s expectations. The number of companies that will invest in IoT will continue to expand rapidly due to technological advancements producing sensors that are smaller, cheaper and more effective.

Paul Wagenseil / via Tom's Guide / Oct. 21, 2019

Two leading VPN providers were hacked, but one may be blaming the other

Leading consumer VPN service provider NordVPN announced today (Oct. 21) that one of its servers had been hacked. But the damage may be worse than NordVPN wants to admit, and rival VPN providers VikingVPN and TorGuard may be affected as well.

In what seems to be a related matter, TorGuard has sued NordVPN, possibly twice. It alleges that NordVPN tried to blackmail TorGuard by threatening to reveal stolen trade secrets, and that NordVPN orchestrated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against TorGuard's servers. (TorGuard is not affiliated with the Tor Project that provides anonymous web surfing and hosting, and NordVPN denies the allegations.)

Zak Doffman / via Forbes / Oct. 20, 2019

Remember the poor goat tied to the fence in Jurassic Park—bait to lure T-Rex into the open? Well think of cyber honeypots as something similar. Monitored machines, mimicking connected smart devices, placed on networks to tempt attacks. And just as T-Rex soon took his bait, so the research team at Kaspersky have had no shortage of hits on the honeypots they have set up. “So far,” the team says, “we have collected results for more than a year—we have deployed more than 50 honeypots around the world, with 20,000 infected sessions every 15 minutes.”

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